Idle Musings

I just feel like ranting about a thing or two today:

The Keystone Pipeline.  I'm a leftie, you read the blog and you know that, I believe in climate change, I believe in not running the AC 24/7 during the summer or leaving store doors open to hot streets while running the AC at 72 degrees in the summer, I believe in rapid transit over cars.  But I'm not a crazy leftie, I do all those wonderful things and then like to fly in business class to London Book Fair so I can have a good healthy carbon footprint just like everyone else.  The environmentalists shouldn't be fighting the Keystone Pipeline like it is the end of the planet.  Yes, the arguments in favor of the pipeline are almost certainly a lot of hooey with regard to the jobs created.  But stopping the pipeline isn't going to stop anything else.  The oil locked in the Canadian tar sands is coming out no matter what, it is getting to market one way or the other, it's happening.  Did you ever see the movie Silver Streak, and the train's roaring along at the end of the movie.  That train is the tar sands.  Now, if Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor had decided to take away the train track, the train was still going to keep coming, maybe crashed or derailed and made a mess of things.  If you wanted to stop the train, you had to get into the engine.  The opposition to Keystone isn't taking control of the engine, it isn't stopping the train, the best you can say is that it might lead to a tidier crash, but the people who are opposing Keystone can't say that for sure, their crash may be worse.

The sequester.  As some background, I've been ambivalent about the sequester.  The big reason for me is that it's so hard to get any defense cuts through normal budget processes, and the sequester doesn't spare the defense department.  We spend more money on defense than the next eight or ten countries combined.  You just can't tell me that with all that money we're spending we can't find ways to spend less and still defend the country.  As an example, why don't we keep one or two bases in Germany or someplace like that to have a nice military hospital and an airfield to help as staging for far away conflicts, and otherwise remove troops from Europe seventy years after World War II and 25 years after the end of the cold war?  I've gotten really super tired of having the SecDef going before Congress to bemoan the sequester and all the harm it's doing and wish Obama, who is after all the boss of things, had told SecDef to shut the f*ck up instead of carrying water for Lockheed.  My opposition to the sequester might be as quixotic or foolish as Bill McKibben's to the Keystone Pipeline because over time, the Lockheed lobbyists will have a lot more money to spend getting their money back from DoD than the advocates for needy people who are losing things in the sequester as well, but it is what it is.

But certainly, if you want to replace the sequester that you helped create, the way to do it isn't by having this constant parade of chicken little forecasts not just about DoD but about everything else.  Because ultimately, a lot of these cuts will take place over time in such a way that they are not discernable to the average person.  Or the departments will find some way to move fungible money around or move job titles around where the craziest cuts don't materialize.  What the average person will see is that we've had the sequester, in spite of chicken little's visit the world hasn't come to an end, and that we can cut the budget.  And they will go from there to deciding that we can in fact run the government without raising taxes or cutting tax expenditures (a.ka. eliminating tax loopholes) or doing anything on the revenue side.  In essence all of Obama's complaining isn't going to help him on the revenue front, it's going to hurt him, he should have just kept his yap shot and his SecDef's mouth shut and everyone else's mouth shut.

But as we've seen time and again, President Obama is not a good negotiator.

I did a tweet about this next subject.  In the good old days, people sent manuscripts and there were rules to follow.  Some of those rules aren't relevant any more.  It doesn't matter if your electronic manuscript is double-spaced, because so much stuff is now being done electronically.  Your editor reading on a Kindle doesn't care what font or size or line spacing you had going in.  If the copy-editor does actually need to look at the manuscript, it's a minute to change the format on a global basis for the file.  But there's one rule that needs to be followed and which many people don't.  You still need a title page with your contact details at the front of your manuscript.  For the exact same reason you needed your address in the old days, only more so.  In the old days, maybe your query got separated from the SASE or your manuscript got separated from your cover letter.  Now, it is 100% sure that they will be.  I will take your attached manuscript, I will put it on my iPad, I will often reformat it into ePub for that purpose to read in iBooks, and there it will sit on my iPad.  Your email?  It will be somewhere in the cloud.  Maybe your e-mail address will be stored as a sent-to address or maybe not or stored under your email address instead of your name.  Maybe I'll want to call you instead of e-mailing you.  Think how much nicer it is for me to go to the front of your manuscript and find all your details there and waiting, vs. having to go and seek out an email from three weeks or three months ago when the submission arrived, only to find that even then, I may want to call you to give the wonderful news that I want to represent your fine first novel, and you've sent me an email that doesn't even have a signature block on it.

We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming.  Thank you for listening to me rant.

Hostage Negotiation

"And I’m confident that as we make tough choices about bringing our deficit down, as I engage in a conversation with the American people about the hard choices we’re going to have to make to secure our future and our children’s future and our grandchildren’s future, it will become apparent that we cannot afford to extend those tax cuts any longer."

That's a quote from President Obama's statement on Dec. 6 about his deal with Republican legislative leaders to undo The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011.

Wow!

And then in his press conference on Dec. 7 to defend the deal, he says (and I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think misquoting) "no I don't think extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the American people think it's a bad idea, but since I haven't been able to persuade Mitch McConnell and John Boehner that it's a bad idea, I have to deal with that reality."

Wow, wow wow.

The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011 was agreed to in 2001. Barack Obama has had his entire two year term to prepare the American people for it, or to eliminate the possibility of this Increase on his terms. Is there anyone in the world other than Barack Obama who believes he's going to start educating the American people on the benefits and drawbacks of the The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011, when he hasn't done anything to do so in his first two years? If you need to prepare people for making difficult decisions, like let's say if I think I have a client who may be in need of a pseudonym, or even a good hard decision like needing to be sure a client has spine for getting a really great deal that can be theirs if they'll let it, I try my best to prepare for those things in advance.

"The hostage here was the American people, and I wasn't prepared to see them be harmed."

"The polls are on our side of this, the problem is the Republicans think this is the single most important thing that they have to fight for as a party."

So after the President has already caved, he has this nice news conference to finally start to educate people.

Maybe there is a big picture here, a longer view. Maybe by presenting himself as the voice of moderation now he can get the good will of the American people on other battles that will need to be fought. He did get some good things for everyone in the deal, including the extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday. He did push through health care. But there as here, he tends to wait too long to show leadership, too long to frame the debate, too long to set a bottom line. And that's just not the way you negotiate. You need to be ahead of the curve and proactive and educating on a constant ongoing basis. I often disagreed with President Bush 2, but you had to respect his adamant ongoing refusal to negotiate with himself when it came to negotiating with congress.

So having the President actively defend today the tax policies that he's been AWOL defending for two years after he's caved on it -- it's not an inspiration. Lot's of things he could have done over those two years. Tried to do an Estate Tax deal more on his terms, tried to suggest his opposition was willing to take the American people as hostages. I'm sure people can find video here or there where he mentioned these things, but can anyone say he was in front of this parade? Can anyone really say that?